“I Read the News Today, Oh Boy”: the British Press and the Beatles Ian Inglis
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Popular Music and Society Vol. 33, No. 4, October 2010, pp. 549–562 “I Read the News Today, Oh Boy”: The British Press and the Beatles Ian Inglis The public arrival of the Beatles in 1963 brought unforeseen difficulties for journalists in the UK. Although there was an established weekly music press, centered around a quartet of titles, its writers had little practical experience of British performers whose popularity and success eclipsed that of their American contemporaries, and who actively sought to create a distinctive musical style of their own. However, the problem was even more acute for the country’s national daily and weekly press: the traditional policy of regarding popular music as either an amusing and peripheral diversion or an incitement to delinquency and depravity left it ill-equipped to structure its coverage of a group whose personalities, behavior, and achievements transcended previous categorizations and blurred the distinction between news and entertainment. The decisions taken by the British press played a crucial role in shaping the early popularity of the Beatles, and also helped to establish a journalistic approach through which popular music became a legitimate and lucrative topic for newspapers in the UK. Throughout the 1950s, popular music in Britain had occupied a relatively small, and unimportant, corner of the entertainment industry. A handful of London-based record labels (Pye, Philips, Decca, EMI) exercised strict controls over entry into the business. While duos were tolerated, musical groups were regarded as cumbersome, outdated obstacles to success, and the preferred template for musical performance was the lead singer and backing group. An “assembly-line” philosophy of songwriting refused any connection between composing and performing, and rendered the concept of the singer-songwriter virtually unknown. The country’s three radio channels (the Light Programme, the Home Service, and the Third Programme, all operated by the BBC) and two television networks (BBC and ITV) provided very few regular outlets for popular music. American records dominated the UK charts, and British performers routinely modeled themselves on the leading US stars, but there was no reciprocity of interest: only a tiny number of British singers and musicians (Lonnie Donegan, Acker Bilk, the Tornados) enjoyed any chart success in the US. ISSN 0300-7766 (print)/ISSN 1740-1712 (online) q 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/03007761003694373 550 I. Inglis The idea that the production and consumption of popular music might contain any intellectual or aesthetic value was seen as preposterous: Hoggart’s contemporary description of “jukebox boys,” trapped in “a myth-world compounded of a few simple elements which they take to be those of American life ... a depressing group [who] are rather less intelligent than the average [and] have no aim, no ambition, no protection, no belief” (248–49), exemplified perfectly the narrow and dismissive attitudes that had prevailed since the emergence of rock and roll and the growth of its teenage audience. In the early 1960s, there seemed to be little reason to believe that this situation might change. Writing at the end of 1962, the British agent/promoter Bunny Lewis declared: I accept the American domination because it is quite natural that we should be up against a steam-roller when it comes to competing with them. Popular music is an American tradition—and believe me, anyone who says it isn’t, is banging his head against a brick wall. America has a much bigger population than we have—therefore much more money. Money breeds power, and it’s power they have. (Lewis 69) This interpretation was reflected in the music press’s unspoken acknowledgement that, just as Hollywood had asserted its command of the international film industry for decades and US television had quickly established its presence across global TV schedules, so too American performers and perspectives would inevitably continue to define the parameters of popular music. As a result, the four leading titles reproduced a weekly product typically constructed around a format that merged a compliant reliance on transatlantic features, interviews, and reviews, with a well-meaning but unconvincing enthusiasm for domestic musical activity that “amounted to little more than news and gossip” (Gudmundsson et al. 41). New Musical Express (1952–), Record Mirror (1954–91, initially published as Record & Show Mirror and New Record Mirror), and Disc (1958–75, latterly published as Disc Weekly and Disc & Music Echo) were relatively recent publications that, since their inception, had been guided by current popularity and record sales; Melody Maker (1926–2000) retained some of its pre-war and immediate post-war focus on jazz but, by the early 1960s, was also shifting toward a more pop-oriented approach. Together, they created a critically bland, but commercially attractive, form of specialist journalism: They provided no perspective, historical or otherwise, on the music they covered; they had no developed critical positions or standards (what was popular equalled, by and large, what was good); they showed no curiosity in where records came from or where they went. The music papers presented the industry’s own public view of itself and were written, accordingly, in a breathy, adman’s prose. (Frith 140) However, within a few months of Lewis’s statement, the Beatles had confronted and overturned all the perennial assumptions that had guided the popular music industry’s policies and practices over the previous decade. A four-piece group from the North of England, that composed its own songs, played its own instruments, swapped Popular Music and Society 551 lead vocals, and celebrated—rather than concealed—its Liverpudlian origins seemed to defy all the established criteria for professional success. And yet, in the first half of 1963, the Beatles achieved two Number One singles (“Please Please Me” and “From Me to You”), a chart-topping album (Please Please Me) and undertook three sell-out nationwide tours. Unaccustomed to the innovative elements they brought to their music, unused to the scenes of increasing hysteria that accompanied the group’s appearances, and unprepared for the Beatles’ refusal to play the role of deferential or inarticulate pop stars, the music weeklies found themselves in the awkward position of having to describe and explain events for which there was no comparable precedent. Of course, journalists based in and around Liverpool had been familiar with the Beatles long before their breakthrough in 1963. As early as August 1961, the fortnightly Mersey Beat had described them as “musically authoritative and physically magnetic ... rhythmic revolutionaries. An act which from beginning to end is a series of climaxes. Truly a phenomenon. I don’t think anything like them will ever happen again” (Wooler 22). Perhaps conscious of the need to avoid unnecessarily alienating any potential readers, the city’s local newspapers had been similarly supportive. In October 1961, the Crosby Herald referred to “their own brand of feet-tapping rock” (“St John Brigade” 78); in January 1962, the South Liverpool Weekly News commented that “the boys are making quite a name for themselves locally . ... it might not be long before they receive nationwide acclaim” (“They’re Hoping” 89). In contrast, early press reaction to the Beatles outside Liverpool was largely negative. Unconstrained by any regional loyalty, the Peterborough Standard’s verdict on the group’s appearance in the town in December 1962, when they supported Frank Ifield, concluded that: there has been a gradual decline in the standard of supporting artists. “The exciting Beatles” rock group quite frankly failed to excite me. The drummer apparently thought that his job was to lead, not to provide rhythm. He made far too much noise, and in their final number “Twist and Shout” it sounded as though everyone was trying to make more noise than the others . ... Frank Ifield is the only one I shall remember. (Whittaker 85) This pattern of local support and national indifference was also evident in press responses to the group’s first single “Love Me Do.” Whereas the review in Mersey Beat described it as “the type of number which grows on you . ... I enjoyed it more and more each time I played it” (Harry 43), and the Liverpool Echo called it “an infectious, medium-paced ballad with an exceptionally haunting harmonica accompaniment” (qtd in Barrow 27), Record Mirror briefly dismissed it as “an okay song [which] drags through the middle, particularly during the harmonica lead” (qtd in Sandercombe 11). When the Beatles’ second single “Please Please Me” was released in January 1963, the level of interest within the music press had grown as a result of the modest chart success of “Love Me Do.” New Musical Express commented that “this vocal and instrumental quartet has turned out a really enjoyable platter, full of beat, vigour and vitality—and what’s more, it’s different. I can’t think of any other group currently 552 I. Inglis recording in this style” (A. Evans). When the record went on to become the group’s first Number One single in the UK, the Beatles were immediately hailed in the music weeklies as an exciting new talent: Record Mirror said they were “hotter than anyone else on the British music scene” (qtd in Sandercombe 14); New Musical Express predicted that “things are beginning to move for the Beatles” (Smith “You’ve Pleased”); Melody Maker announced “it’s happening big for the Beatles” (“The Beat Boys” 1). Unsurprisingly, their chart achievements were insufficient to stimulate the attention of the national press. For the daily and Sunday newspapers, concentrated in and around Fleet Street in London, popular music was perceived as an appropriate source of news only when its narrative displayed some combination of the components of “newsworthiness” originally identified by Galtung and Ruge: frequency, threshold, unambiguity, meaningfulness, consonance, unexpectedness, continuity, composition, elite status, personalization, negativity (64–91).